


Labor of Love

by Bowser_Sourpuss_Bread



Series: Tales From The Garreg Mach School of Peace: My Three Houses Modern AU [10]
Category: Fire Emblem Series, Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Alternate Universe - After College/University, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Although that's by design, Homophobia, Homophobic family sucks, Linny thinks a lot more than he lets on fam, M/M, More disability headcanons..!, Narcolepsy, Narcoleptic Linhardt, Reality TV, So they're not part of their family anymore, Weddings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-18
Updated: 2020-02-18
Packaged: 2021-02-28 06:07:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,237
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22789216
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bowser_Sourpuss_Bread/pseuds/Bowser_Sourpuss_Bread
Summary: Linhardt thought a lot about weddings. And then he had his own.
Relationships: Caspar von Bergliez/Linhardt von Hevring
Series: Tales From The Garreg Mach School of Peace: My Three Houses Modern AU [10]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1629751
Comments: 1
Kudos: 50





	Labor of Love

My parents liked to watch weddings. Weddings between strangers. Strangers to us, sometimes even strangers to each other. The wedding was the culmination of the game. The game of love.

I wonder what it says about my parents that they spent more time worrying about TV marriages than their own. They floated around the universe as separate planets: detached, not angry or sad or anything. Just aloof. In that case, my creation was a cosmic event: the once-in-a-lifetime alignment between celestial bodies.

I like that idea.

I also liked to watch weddings. But while my parents liked to watch the resplendent cakes, the exquisite attire, the pomp and circumstance… I liked to watch the people. I always thought it was strange, that at a wedding, some people don’t watch the people.

I didn’t care either way about the people, even if I recognized them from one show or another. I watched a lot of television. What TV only showed in fleeting glimpses, like stealing knowledge from a world away, was the ease of affection that what, the rings, the party, some piece of paper, provided.

I knew I wanted that with Caspar von Bergliez.

* * *

I met Caspar when I was 6 years old. I say it like I sought him out. He was the one who found me, and our parents, brought into the same orbit by some noble or another’s gravity, put us in the same room.

I was jostled awake from a lovely dream by some kid asking me to play. I told him I wanted to sleep.

I thought that would be the end of it. He was hardly the first child my parents had brought in to try to knock me away from their solar system.

But then he laid down next to me. I can’t speak for him, but for me, it was love at first snore.

* * *

Those early years, I hadn’t thought much beyond that with love. Caspar liked to sleep with me. Therefore, I loved Caspar. It was a simple, elegant equation.

Puberty has a way of complicating matters. We were 11 years old. Or maybe I was 12, and he was still 11. I don’t know.

What I did know, even then, was that my goal was going to be difficult to achieve.

Caspar has siblings. I’ve never bothered to learn their names. They’ve never bothered to learn mine. I’d have forgotten them if they hadn’t been so cruel to Caspar.

We were having a pool party. It wasn’t my idea, but it was at Caspar’s house, in Caspar’s pool, so I was willing to go. We could go take a nap afterwards.

Maybe I was more aware than I realized.

After swimming (and by swimming, I mean “nearly drowning multiple times by Caspar’s siblings holding me underwater intentionally or unintentionally”), I took a nap. Caspar was keeping his siblings busy. He thought it would help me sleep.

I was woken up by him screaming. “Linhardt! Stay back!”

It didn’t make much of a difference. I would’ve been woken up by the wave of water that crashed down upon me a second later.

Except… It  _ did _ make a difference. Because Caspar was now wet. And still half-asleep, I saw him in a different way.

I had seen this on television. The camera zooms in. The music swells. But I had only ever seen it between a man and a woman on television. But that wasn’t a problem. Not really. I was never so uncreative, even as a child, to never replace the woman with a man, or the man with a woman, or scramble the duo entirely to make more people or less gender or whatever.

No, the problem came when Caspar led me to his room, so I could change into  _ not _ swimming clothes that  _ weren’t _ soaking wet. We walked behind the couch. Caspar’s father was watching television. It was the news. Two men had been beaten for kissing. Caspar’s father laughed. He said it “showed them.” He also said other words. You’re creative. You can put in what you want.

As he closed the door so I could change, in the privacy of the boy I wanted to kiss’ room, I realized that he could protect me from the water, but he couldn’t protect me from a mob of people “showing us.”

Well, that wasn’t about to stop me. I’d show them. I started making plans for our wedding when I was 11 years old.

* * *

It helped to be away from Caspar’s family. I got the acceptance letter to Garreg Mach School of Peace first. I was pleased; it would be very hard to have our wedding with the threat of battle looming over us.

But it would be even more difficult to have our wedding if we had to go through a long-distance relationship. Caspar’s phone is always dead. Sometimes, his siblings broke it.

I’d do it. It’d be work, but I’d do it.

Luckily, he got a letter too. That made my work a lot less complicated.

I thought that being away from them from make things easier for him. It did, in some ways. But in others, he felt the need to prove himself in a way he never had felt before. Or maybe he did, and he just never had the chance.

So I let him. I started watching weddings again in the meantime.

* * *

It was at our last year at Garreg Mach that it happened.

What? No, not a confession. My fall from the stairwell. I don’t recall it myself. Head trauma and all that. But I do remember waking up and him being there. He hadn’t slept.

We had had close calls before. Like Raphael with the blood bag for Edelgard. But this was the first time that  _ someone else _ confirmed to us that it was a close call.

Seteth believed Caspar: It wasn’t normal for me to just tumble down the stairs. I guess no one else believed in my self-preservation instinct.

School was a wild time.

I got diagnosed with narcolepsy. Life went on. But I saw that he saw me differently now. He had his awakening. His was through blood. Mine was through water. Fitting, I think.

* * *

He was the one who proposed to me. “You know I love you, right?”

“I do.”

“How long have we been together?”

“How long do  _ you _ think we’ve been together?”

“Since we were 6,” he emphatically stated. He paused, then, “...Wanna let the world know?”

Call us crazy, like those TV couples, for jumping right into engagement, but we’d been dating for most of our lives. Despite all of my work, I only had one detail or two worked out for our wedding. I was relieved that Caspar jumped in to do the rest of the work.

But the day came. Well, no. The night. One of my details.

We sealed the social contract with the social contract of morning: the sunrise. The wedding guests hated us. Various degrees of hate, of course, but as Caspar carried me down the aisle, one of  _ his _ details, we curled up under a shady tree, like the one where we took that first nap together, and dreamed of the effortlessness of love we would have once we were done with the pomp and circumstance.

Just as planned, we thinned out the crowd to people who only hated us a little for the wedding party.


End file.
